Github-and-API-Basics

Tutorial on basic git and API

Intro/Goals

Welcome to HAkron! Make sure to bring a laptop so you can follow along with the lesson!

Everything in this guide will be covered in the lesson -- this is just to give you an idea about what we'll cover, or to help you catch up if you miss something that was said.

The goal of this lesson is to learn how to use Github, set up a repository, and learn some things about API!

Github - What Is It, and Why Use It?

If you already know what github is, skip this section.

Github is for project management! Here's some reasons to use Github:

• It allows you to share projects, either with a team or with the whole world, and set permissions on who can and can't contribute.
• If you don't have permission to edit a project, you can 'fork' it -- make a copy of it -- and edit it all you want
• Github uses Git, a version control system (like SVN, if you've used that) that lets you work on your projects from any computer, and lets you go between different saved versions anytime you want.
• When you have multiple people working on a project, Git also helps handle "merge conflicts" -- when two different users submit two different, conflicting submissions
• A bunch of other neat organization tools, like issues, wikis, and readme files like this one!!

-- Github Glossary

--- Some Github terms you might be confused by:

• Git -- Version control system. You install this on your computer to let you easily move things to and from Github.
• Github -- The website hosting everything submitted by Git.
• Repository (or repo) -- Any github project. Basically just a set of files hosted on github.
• Clone -- You can take a Github repo and clone it to your local computer so you can work on it.
• Commit -- Once you have a local clone of a repo, you can submit a commit of your changes back to the parent repo. Each commit is basically a 'version', when we talk about version control.
  • (Note that git commit won't submit your code to Github on its own. The full process for committing code is git add [whatever files were changed], git commit -m "your commit message", git push. We'll go over this later.)

Github Setup

The first thing we need is to set up a github account. If you already have a github account, skip this portion.

Go to github.com and sign up with a unique username, and an email you can access.

Select the free account option and press continue. Fill out the survey if you'd like, it's optional. You'll now need to confirm your email.

Repo Setup

Once you have a confirmed Github account, click on the + icon in the upper lefthand corner of Github, and select "New Repository".

Name your repository whatever you want -- "My first site" or something. Add a description, decide whether you want it to be public or not, and check the box that says "initialize this repository with a README".

Congrats, you just made your first Github repo!

Git setup/Cloning our repo!

Now, we need to set up Git on your computer. To do this, we're going to learn some basic terminal commands!

Mac/linux Git Install instructions:

If you're using a Mac or Linux OS, open up the terminal. On a mac, you should be able to find it by searching for "terminal", or looking in your Applications folder. To see if you have git, type git --version and press enter. If you don't have it yet, follow these instructions, and then restart your terminal to see if it worked.

Windows Git Install Instructions:

If you're using a Windows computer, open up Windows Powershell. You should be able to find it by searching for it. (Command Prompt should also work, but I like powershell more.) To see if you have git, type git --version and press enter. If you don't have it yet, follow these instructions, and then restart your powershell to see if it worked.

For either setup, remember to do these commands too:

 git config --global user.name "Your name"
 git config --global user.email "[email protected]"

Cloning the Repo

Now that you have Git installed, we can finally clone our repo! But first, we need to learn how to use our terminal.

Your terminal always points to somewhere on your computer, and we can type different commands to navigate through our computer and interact with files. (Tip: Pressing 'tab' in the terminal will try to autocomplete whatever you're typing.)

Here are the terminal commands we'll be using:

• cd [somewhere] -- stands for "change directory". Replace [somewhere] with an existing folder.
  • cd .. will take you back one folder (ex: if you're in ~/Files/myfolder/, cd .. takes you to ~/Files/)
  • cd ~ will take you to your "home directory" from wherever you are.
• ls -- is an abbreviation for "list", which doesn't make sense but whatever. It lists all the files and folders in your current directory
• mkdir [folder name] -- stands for "make directory". Will make a folder named [folder name] in the current directory

If you type cd ~/Desktop, you'll navigate straight to your desktop. From there, navigate to wherever you want to keep your project on your folder. You can also type mkdir github or something to make a folder named "github" on your desktop (You would then type cd github/ to go inside of that folder.)

Once you're in the folder you want to store your projects, go back to your github repo, and click the green

Go to your repo page on Github and find the green button that says 'Clone or download', and copy the URL it shows. Go back to the terminal and the following command, replacing [ur] with the URL you copied:

git clone [url]

Unless you have an error, congrats! You just cloned your repo to your computer! You can now enter cd [repo name] to go int

HAkron API demo

Intro:

Demo of the Wikipedia API with a simple python application Application takes input from user and returns a summary from wikipedia of the topic

Install Stuff:

To install Python 2.7 on Windows:

Install here :)

To install Python 2.7 on macOS:

First install Homebrew :0

Then install Python 2.7 by typing the following in your terminal:

brew install python

Install a text editor:

• Any of these will work:

  • Visual Studio
  • Atom
  • Sublime Text
  • Vim

Lets get coding!

First open Git Bash if you're on windows or a terminal if you're on macOS

cd (change directory) back into the project folder we cloned before

Then open that folder in your favorite text editor!

From the editor make a new file and call it 'wiki_api_demo.py'

What to write

For this demo we are going to be using the Wikipedia API with Python2. Documentation for the API can be found here.

First we need to install the wikipedia API so that Python knows how to use it. To do that we will use pip, a package manager for Python.

• Type pip install wikipedia
• If that doesn't work go ahead and give it a sudo pip install python.

Boom. Now we have wikipedia. Test it out in the python interactive shell. In the terminal type python. Once in python try import wikipedia.

To leave the interactive shell type exit() or press ctrl-z. If you have any issues grab one of the floaters to help you out!

NOW we can go back to the file we created in our text editor and type that same line import wikipedia.

For a simple demo we can take a users input, search wikipedia and give the result back to the user. Pretty simple.

So first we need to accept user's input. Do that like so

user_input = raw_input("What would you like to learn about today? ")

Finally search wikipedia and return that search to the user

print wikipedia.summary(user_input)

What happens next

To run your sweet little program go back to the terminal and use python to interpret what you wrote

python wiki_api_demo.py

Pushing to our Github Repo with Git

So, now we have our program! Let's save it to our Github repo, so the whole world can see it!

Go back to your terminal and navigate to your repo folder. There's three steps to saving to Github:

1. Add your files by typing git add *. The astrisk * is used to mean "everything in this folder." Alternatively, we could type git add wiki_api_demo.py to only submit a single files.

2. Commit your files with git commit -m "My first commit message". Instead of writing "my first commit message", you should really explain what changes you made in this commit. This is called a 'commit message'. Note that committing your code creates a log of what has been added, and gets it ready to put onto Github, but it doesn't actually transfer it yet!

3. Enter git push to "push" all your local commits to your github repo.

If you didn't get any errors, go to Github and see if your code is all there! Congratulations!